Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise virtually in the House tonight to pursue a question I initially asked in question period. I asked it on November 14, 2022, just as COP27, the 27th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, was under way in Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt.
The Secretary General of the United Nations opened that conference saying that the world is “on a highway to climate hell, foot still on the accelerator.” That is the situation we are in today, and the question I put to the minister was whether the Prime Minister had chosen to stay away from Sharm el-Sheikh and COP27 knowing that we are one of those countries with the foot on the accelerator.
I want to concentrate more, in the time I have this evening, on the response I received from the hon. parliamentary secretary. His response was that we are doing wonderful things in Canada, that our foot is not on the accelerator, and that we can ignore what we are doing in expanding fossil fuel infrastructure with the shameful decision to buy the Kinder Morgan pipeline, spending public money on a project that violates indigenous rights, threatens the ecosystems of the 800 crossings of watercourses between Alberta and Burnaby, and threatens the ecosystems of the Salish Sea with a spill that would not be of crude oil but, even more impossible to clean up, diluted bitumen. We can set that all aside and ignore it because of all the wonderful things the government is doing.
The hon. parliamentary secretary pointed to $100 billion in climate spending and a $9-billion emissions reduction plan. Let us be honest about this. Let us stop pretending that spending billions of dollars will protect our children and grandchildren from an unlivable world. When the UN Secretary General spoke of climate hell, he was not being hyperbolic. It is the reality of the science we are looking at, and it is deeply distressing. In fact, looking at it soberly, it is terrifying.
One of the things we know is that the IPCC report from last spring, April 4, 2022, spoke of the opportunity we have to hold to the Paris commitments of a 1.5°C global average temperature increase, and as far below 2°C as possible. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change made it clear that both of those goals, both of those avoidances of the worst, will not be possible unless global emissions of greenhouse gases hit their peak and then drop rapidly before 2025. We are at 2023, and we have less than 24 months to ensure that global emissions hit their highest-ever level and drop rapidly from there.
The Government of Canada continues to pretend that by spending money on electric cars and consumer heat pumps, which is a good thing to do, it can distract the Canadian public with the fact that it is spending $8 billion on more subsidies through something called carbon capture and storage, which, all around the world, has already been shown to be highly expensive and highly ineffective. We are also spending hundreds of millions of dollars on nuclear technology, which is not a solution to the climate crisis.
We are putting money, according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, into what we now own, a pipeline that we are all shareholders in, the Trans Mountain pipeline, for a horrible total of $21 billion. In other words, the government is spending more on putting the foot on the accelerator on the highway to climate hell than we are in avoiding that disaster.